Catalogues and bibliographies

Catalogues

The National Library provides a broad range of information services based on the catalogues of its own collections, union catalogues, and Polish and foreign information resources. Intensive work is underway on retroconversion of the traditional card catalogue – i. e., its transfer to electronic format. The main online catalogue since 1997 is using INNOPAC software. The data in the catalogue are encoded in the Unicode standard, owing to which the National Library may cooperate with the European Library – a portal for searching the content of most of Europe’s libraries.

Bibliographic activity

The National Library performs the duties of the national bibliographic agency, and at the same time the national centre of information on library documents. It compiles and publishes both the print-on-paper and the electronic version of the current and retrospective national bibliography, and special bibliographies: a bibliography of Polish bibliographies and a bibliography of library science. The current national bibliography is composed of “Przewodnik Bibliograficzny” [Bibliographic Guide], which registers books, “Bibliografia Zawartości Czasopism” [Index to Periodicals], “Bibliografia Wydawnictw Ciągłych” [Bibliography of Serials], “Bibliografia Wydawnictw Ciągłych Nowych, Zawieszonych i Zmieniających Tytuł” [Bibliography of Serials – New, Suspended and Changed Titles”], and ‘‘Polonica Zagraniczne” [Foreign Polonica], as well as the “Bibliografia Dokumentów Elektronicznych” [Bibliography of Electronic Documents] published since 2001, and the “Bibliografia Dokumentów Kartograficznych” [Bibliography of Cartographic Documents] covering data since 2002.
Two statistical reports prepared at the National Library are helpful in defining the situation of the book and libraries in Poland: the official statistics of Polish publishing generated on the basis of the data registered in the current national bibliography and published as the annual “Ruch Wydawniczy w Liczbach” [Polish Publishing in Figures], and the annually published “Biblioteki Publiczne w Liczbach” [Public Libraries in Figures].